The San Gabriel Valley’s Temple City opened its excellent new Rosemead Boulevard Project on May 10, 2014. I didn’t make it out to the grand opening festivities, but I recently got a chance to bicycle there and experience the new Rosemead Blvd first hand. It’s great. All Southern California cyclists should make pilgrimages — and spend money while you’re there.

The project, shown in green on the above map, is on both sides of Rosemead Boulevard for its entire length through Temple City. It extends two miles from Calita Street to the railroad undercrossing near Lower Azusa Road. The area is mostly commercial strips, with some housing, apartments, and single family homes interspersed. Overall, it’s suburban, though somewhat older suburban. Most of the commercial buildings are set back far from the street; there are plenty of surface parking lots.

Rosemead Boulevard’s protected bike lanes are quite different than L.A. County’s first protected bike lanes on Third and Broadway in Downtown Long Beach; both are first class facilities, though. The Long Beach project includes bike signalization at nearly all signalized intersections; as far as I could tell, Temple City didn’t make any changes to traffic signals. Traffic signals can markedly increase costs for protected bikeways. Temple City doesn’t appear to have skimped on costs, though. The project includes extensive landscaping, and lots of curb-work, including landscaped center-median islands.

Temple City’s treatments vary a great deal. Section treatments–see images below–ranged from landscaped-island-protected bikeway to parking-protected bikeway to buffered bike lane to basic bike lane (with and without parking) to short stretches of sharrows.

The best parts of the Rosemead Boulevard Project, roughly half of the mileage, had this configuration: no parking, wide bike lane – roughly 6-feet, suitable for two cyclists side-by-side – and tree-lined landscaped median protecting the bike lane from adjacent traffic lane.

Existing sharrow on 4th Street just east of Norton Avenue this morning. Joe Linton/LA Streetsblog

Via an article published yesterday in the LADOT Bike Blog, the department announced that it would be adding “approximately 20 miles” of “new sharrows… over the course of the next year.” The article includes a spreadsheet listing of where these sharrows will be implemented.

In case readers are unfamiliar with them, Sharrows are shared lane markings. They designate lanes that are shared by bikes and cars. Sharrows are generally the lowest of the low-hanging-fruit, useful where squeezing in a more robust bike facility is difficult. They don’t take any parking, any lanes, any inches, any time away from cars. They are just a reminder to drivers that bicyclists will be on the street and tell bicyclists where to ride to stay out of the “door zone.”

After four years, many complaints, many praises, and a final acceptance that they really aren’t that bad, the green Sharrows in Belmont Shore have turned 4. And with that, data have been released so that we can figure out precisely what we’ve learned.

The Sharrows stretch along 2nd street in between Bayshore and Livingstone Drives along a street that is heavily commercial: With 15 blocks, there are 14 stop lights and a consistent push for parking that borders the intensity of hell sometimes. In other words, more than acting as a complete street, it acted as some vehicular arterial that welcomed pedestrians but forced bicyclists to dangerously roll along the sidewalk or uncomfortably ride in traffic untuned to their presence.

Hence the Sharrows which, according to Bike Long Beach, was created for three reasons: encourage bicyclists to ride the lane safely; reduce bicyclists on sidewalks to increase safety; and encourage bicycling on a larger scale.

But have they proven effective?

According to the data, somewhat yes. For the two and a half years prior to the Sharrows being installed—2007 to mid-2009—Belmont Shore had over 90 crashes of which nine involved bikes and two involved a pedestrian.

Following the Sharrows completion on June 25, 2009, there was a drop in overall collisions in 2010 and 2011—33 and 27 respectively—but a spike in bicyclist—4 and 6—as well as pedestrian collisions in 2011 with 3. Then it drops for 2012 drastically, with just 12 collisions overall and no bicyclist/ped-involved collisions. Read more…

One of the problems for those of us who ride our bikes to the beach from points further inland is how to access the popular Santa Monica and Venice sections of the beachfront Marvin Braude bike path (pdf) that runs along the coast from Pacific Palisades to Palos Verdes.

The bluffs that protect the city from the sea also limit direct access to the coast, as does the dangerously high-speed traffic that careens along PCH all day and night throughout the week.

For some, the answer is the walkway that runs under the coast highway at West Channel Drive, allowing riders to walk their bikes down a flight of stairs and underneath the speeding traffic. Assuming they don’t mind traversing a dark and secluded walkway, completely hidden from public view.

While Gary Kavanagh is on a short hiatus, Ted Rogers and Juan Matute will cover the Santa Monica beat for Streetsblog. This column is supported by Bike Center and the Library Alehouse

The 3rd District of Long Beach is home to the first Sharrow lanes in the city on 2nd Street in Belmont Shore. Today, the 3rd is expanding its number of Sharrows as it prepares to repave Livingston Drive between 2nd Street and Termino Avenue.

The stretch of road–a little less than a half-mile–desperately needs repaving. Councilmember Gary DeLong claims the project will only get more expensive if the city continues to wait. As with all street designs, city staff tries to take bike mobility and foot traffic into consideration, while also trying to maintain parking spaces–particularly in crowded parking areas like Belmont Heights.

“Retaining parking spaces was an important criteris and this design protects the existing parking,” said DeLong.

Heading westbound on 2nd Street takes you to the Livingston Drive fork, where heading westbound on Livingston eventually takes you to Ocean Boulevard towards downtown via three lanes. One of those lanes will now be a service road with a protective median and the parking spots lining it will remain intact; traffic engineers have claimed that the loss of the third lane will not exacerbate traffic congestion. Along with the median for bicyclist protection, the road will have Sharrow markings to remind motorists to share the road with bicyclists and guide cyclists to the safest place to ride on the road. Read more…

New bike lanes on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood - among the 12 new miles of bike lanes implemented in late 2011.

The good news: the city of Los Angeles is implementing more bike lanes than ever before. From July 2011 through December 2011, the city of Los Angeles has implemented 12.5 miles of new bike lanes. This is by far the highest total for any six-month period since at least 1996, and probably the most ever. For the past decade or so, the city has averaged roughly two-to-three miles of new bike lanes every six months.

Last weekend, in an impressive display of what LADOT can do on city streets when it puts its mind to it, 4 teams of LADOT employees spread out throughout the city and placed 803 Sharrows over 20.61 miles of city streets.

LADOT caused some controversy when it announced it would include these Sharrows as part of its commitment to “40 miles of bike infrastructure every year.” Including those Sharrows with other infrastructure, mostly bike lanes, that have been installed LADOT has installed 30.3 miles of bike facilities since the fiscal year started on July 1.

Starting last Friday night at 9:00 P.M., the first crew took to the streets with the last one starting at 2:00 A.M. on Saturday morning. Crews worked around the clock until the 803’rd Sharrow was placed on the ground at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday.

When Jonathan Weiss emailed me two weeks ago announcing that Sharrows placeholders appeared on Motor Avenue, I didn’t think too much of it. After all, stencils marking a place for bike racks have been on the ground next to my Big Blue Bus stop for almost five months.

However, apparently LADOT contractors were working overtime again, because yesterday morning Weiss grabbed the above pictures while out on a Sunday morning Constitutional. He was greeted by these views cycling Southbound on Motor Avenue. New Sharrows have already been spotted on Arden Ave., Fountain Avenue, Yucca Street and Vine Street in the Mid-/K-/Downtown areas. If you see more Sharrows on the street, drop us a line and let us know.

Sharrows will appear on Motor Ave. right where that little arrow is...Photo: Jonathan Weiss

Earlier this week, Joe Linton noticed that marking were appearing on mid-town streets to mark the spot where Sharrows would be placed. Linton is one of the harshest critics of the city’s attempts to jump off the Bike Plan to add Sharrows to city streets to reach the Mayor’s stated promise of 40 miles of bike projects every year for the next five.

Linton’s fellow Los Angeles Bicycle Advisory Committee Member Jonathan Weiss spotted Sharrows markings (the x and arrow designating where a Sharrow should go) along Motor Avenue on the Westside. The quick takeaway is that LADOT is serious about getting these 20 miles of new Sharrowed streets on the ground as quickly as possible.

We should note that the same section of Motor Avenue that is going to receive the Sharrows is due to receive bike lanes in the Bike Plan that was passed in March of this year. There is no timeline on when the Sharrows will be converted to Bike Lanes. But in the meantime, the city that took almost eight years to implement its first Sharrows now seems to be embracing them with gusto.

After the unanimous passage of Safe and Healthy Streets, Bogart celebrates with staff and supporters. All pics via the LACBC's Glendae website.

There’s always a risk when an advocate is hired by a government agency. Will the advocate “go native” and be an ineffective agent of change? Will the advocate ever be able to shake his reputation of being “just” an advocate?

When the City of Glendale and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition submitted a joint application for a Policies for Livable Active Communities and Environments (PLACE) Grant, they decided to go in a different direction then the other PLACE Communities. While the end product of their grant is the Safe and Healthy Streets Document, perhaps the best case study for other cities is how the city, LACBC and the PLACE Grant Coordinator they both hired all worked together.

The team proposed that the PLACE Coordinator would work for the LACBC as an employee, but would be embedded full-time with city staff. When Colin Bogart was hired to be the PLACE Coordinator, he worked out of an office in the Glendale Civic Center, not in Downtown Los Angeles in the LACBC offices.

“Even though he was physically removed from the office, it still didn’t feel like he was that far away,” remarked LACBC Executive Director Jennifer Klausner. “Having a full time employee, dedicated to a particular place that isn’t the headquarters, can be hard for an organization. But it never felt like he was that far away.”

It was a unique situation, even the grant makers in the L.A. County Public Health Department weren’t sure how it was going to work out. But, three years later, the experiment was such a success that everyone I spoke with in Glendale to prepare for this series, from advocates, to city staff, all the way up to Mayor Laura Friedman were devastated to see Bogart go back to the LACBC’s Downtown offices when the grant expired on July 1 of this year. I met with Glendale Mayor Laura Friedman two days before the grant expired and she claimed she was “in denial” that Bogart would be leaving soon.

One thing that made the PLACE Grant such a success in Glendale was that Bogart understood the advantages and limits of his somewhat unique position. Unlike PLACE Coordinators in other cities, Bogart had direct access to the decision makers in Glendale’s government but could speak to advocates throughout the city as “one of them” and not a member of the city government.

There are several lessons that other cities, and advocacy groups can learn from Glendale, Bogart’s and the LACBC’s experience. Here are some things to consider if you work for a city or non-profit that’s considering the embedded activist model for their city.